Thread by @usacsmret

"National conservatives" set out to define the future of politics on the right dailysign.al/2Gy7J4G via @JarrettStepman @DailySignal

@JarrettStepman @DailySignal Critics of nationalism, noted Mary Eberstadt, a writer and fellow at the Hoover Institution, have offered no real alternative as a way to organize society.
Eberstadt asked in her remarks, “What, after all, is an alternative to nationalism?”

@JarrettStepman @DailySignal “Anti-nationalism? Antipathy to one’s fellow citizens because they are one’s fellow citizens? Pathological aversion to one’s own country? Narcissistic flight to group identities that treat everyone outside those identities as somehow un-American? The questions answer themselves”

@JarrettStepman @DailySignal The rise of modern identity politics is highly corrosive to the country, said David Azerrad. It teaches nothing but grievance for those deemed to be oppressed, and self-flagellation for those deemed to be oppressors.

@JarrettStepman @DailySignal “The net effect of this relentless identitarian propaganda is to encourage passive resignation in the American people,” Azerrad said. “The goal is to get us to believe that identity politics is the engine that drives history with a capital ‘H,’ and that we must all submit to it.”

@JarrettStepman @DailySignal “To put it simply, identity politics is fundamentally incompatible with the idea of a nation,” Azerrad said.
The end result of it will be disunity and tribalism, he added. The only way to counteract this inevitability is to “accentuate our common ties as Americans.”

@JarrettStepman @DailySignal Since the 1960s the number of federal employees has remained constant at about 2 million, yet federal power has greatly expanded. This phenomenon arises because Washington has outsourced many civil service functions to contractors, nonprofit groups, and lower levels of government

@JarrettStepman @DailySignal According to New York University professor Paul Light, the true size of the federal government’s “blended workforce” is now somewhere between 7 million and 9 million people.

@JarrettStepman @DailySignal The biggest portion of the blended federal workforce consists of federal contractors. Today, there are about 3.7 million federal contractors—almost twice as many as there were in the 1960s.

@JarrettStepman @DailySignal These contractors fill a wide range of functions: security in war zones, statistical analyses, janitorial services, management consulting, and almost everything in between.

@JarrettStepman @DailySignal In addition to government contractors, a large portion of the nonprofit sector exists to execute federal policies. In fact, federal grant money is the primary source of income for about 1.6 million nonprofit workers.

@JarrettStepman @DailySignal These salaries are underwritten by the $235 billion the federal government lays out to nonprofits each year. This money funds everything from Head Start and foster care to health clinics and financial literacy programs.

@JarrettStepman @DailySignal The amount of inflation-adjusted federal funding handed to state and local governments has increased tenfold since the 1960s, a wellspring of cash that has allowed state and local governments to triple their labor forces.

@JarrettStepman @DailySignal While conservatives focus on the long-term goal of rolling back regulations and reining in federal spending, they must also grapple with the dangers of handing over the public’s business to nonprofits and private companies.

@JarrettStepman @DailySignal While private citizens can demand unclassified documents from federal agencies, they cannot make such requests of Deloitte or Raytheon. Their operations are far less transparent, even if their processes are much more efficient.

@JarrettStepman @DailySignal It’s not even clear which companies are receiving federal dollars. According to a 2014 report by the Government Accountability Office, only 2% to 7% of grant and contract awards on the website contained information that was fully consistent with agency records.

@JarrettStepman @DailySignal Federal reliance on state and local governments is no less problematic. State governments have become increasingly reliant on grant money from the federal government, which gives Washington tremendous leverage.

@JarrettStepman @DailySignal This is a troubling perversion of federalism and enables the federal government to essentially bribe states into complying with onerous mandates that the federal government could not otherwise impose.

@JarrettStepman @DailySignal Conservatives have focused on the waste, fraud, and abuse of public-sector employees for decades, and for good reason. But it’s time to widen the focus to private-sector companies, nonprofits, and state and local governments.

@JarrettStepman @DailySignal Big government has to be confronted head-on. Starving the beast does not work. Just as cutting revenues led to runaway deficits, rather than forcing the government to live within those straitened means, capping labor gave birth to the blended federal workforce.